BOOK THE SECOND

8. Chapter VIII
(continued)

With an earnestness and a patience which he had never before commanded for
his pleasures, Arbaces had devoted himself to win the heart of Ione. It did
not content him to love, he desired to be loved. In this hope he had watched
the expanding youth of the beautiful Neapolitan; and, knowing the influence
that the mind possesses over those who are taught to cultivate the mind, he
had contributed willingly to form the genius and enlighten the intellect of
Ione, in the hope that she would be thus able to appreciate what he felt
would be his best claim to her affection: viz, a character which, however
criminal and perverted, was rich in its original elements of strength and
grandeur. When he felt that character to be acknowledged, he willingly
allowed, nay, encouraged her, to mix among the idle votaries of pleasure, in
the belief that her soul, fitted for higher commune, would miss the
companionship of his own, and that, in comparison with others, she would
learn to love herself. He had forgot, that as the sunflower to the sun, so
youth turns to youth, until his jealousy of Glaucus suddenly apprised him of
his error. From that moment, though, as we have seen, he knew not the
extent of his danger, a fiercer and more tumultuous direction was given to a
passion long controlled. Nothing kindles the fire of love like the
sprinkling of the anxieties of jealousy; it takes then a wilder, a more
resistless flame; it forgets its softness; it ceases to be tender; it
assumes something of the intensity--of the ferocity--of hate.

Arbaces resolved to lose no further time upon cautious and perilous
preparations: he resolved to place an irrevocable barrier between himself
and his rivals: he resolved to possess himself of the person of Ione: not
that in his present love, so long nursed and fed by hopes purer than those
of passion alone, he would have been contented with that mere possession.
He desired the heart, the soul, no less than the beauty, of Ione; but he
imagined that once separated by a daring crime from the rest of
mankind--once bound to Ione by a tie that memory could not break, she would
be driven to concentrate her thoughts in him--that his arts would complete
his conquest, and that, according to the true moral of the Roman and the
Sabine, the empire obtained by force would be cemented by gentler means.
This resolution was yet more confirmed in him by his belief in the
prophecies of the stars: they had long foretold to him this year, and even
the present month, as the epoch of some dread disaster, menacing life
itself. He was driven to a certain and limited date. He resolved to crowd,
monarch-like, on his funeral pyre all that his soul held most dear. In his
own words, if he were to die, he resolved to feel that he had lived, and
that Ione should be his own.